“Traditional e-commerce sites just feel like a shelf of goods to most customers. Spun off from Microsoft Software Technology Center Asia in 2020, Xiaoice has always been focused on creating more human-like AI, particularly avatars that are capable of showing emotions. You don’t want it to be talking about the Follow button while it’s clapping its hands. “We want to make sure the spoken language and the body language are matching. Xiaoice’s AI streamers replicate all these common tricks. Similarly, when streamers introduce a new product, they point down-to the shopping cart, where viewers can find all products. Move your fingers and hit the follow button,’ they are definitely pointing their finger upward, because that’s where the ‘Follow’ button is on the screen of most mobile livestream apps,” says Huang. “For example, ‘Welcome to my livestream channel. The company has a database of nearly a hundred pre-designed movements. These livestream AI clones are trained on the common scripts and gestures seen in e-commerce videos, says Huang Wei, the director of virtual influencer livestreaming business at the Chinese AI company Xiaoice. It can even adjust its marketing strategy based on the number of viewers, Sima says. A more advanced version of the technology can spot live comments and find matching answers in its database to answer in real time, so it looks as if the AI streamer is actively communicating with the audience. Now, all the human workers have to do is input basic information such as the name and price of the product being sold, proofread the generated script, and watch the digital influencer go live. While the scripts were once pre-written by humans, companies are now using large language models to generate them too. Once the avatar is generated, its mouth and body move in time with the scripted audio. Other than the generation, that fee also covers a year of maintenance. If the client wants to create a more complicated and capable streamer, the price can go up to several thousands of dollars. Generating a basic AI clone now costs a customer about 8,000 RMB ($1,100). The next year, it was 10 minutes, then three, and now only one minute of video is needed.Īnd as the tech has improved, the service has gotten cheaper too. But Sima Huapeng, its founder and CEO, says his company first started to see AI’s potential as a livestreaming tool in 2020.īack then, Silicon Intelligence needed 30 minutes of training videos to generate a digital clone that could speak and act like a human. But now, Chinese AI companies have found a new use case that seems to be going quite well.įounded in 2017, Nanjing-based startup Silicon Intelligence specializes in natural-language processing, particularly text-to-speech technologies like robocall tools. While there have been attempts to commercialize it in more innocuous ways, it has always remained a novelty. The technology has mostly been known for its problematic use in revenge porn, identity scams, and political misinformation.
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